AT LARGE: Documentary focuses on black a cappella music

Sunday

Feb 5, 2012 at 12:05 AM

If you, like me, are a fan of "roots" music, especially from Alabama and elsewhere in the South, you should not miss documentary film director Robert Clem's "The Jefferson County Sound," which will air Monday at 8 p.m. on Alabama Public Television.The labor of love by my old college classmate and fellow preacher's kid takes its name from a distinctive form of black a cappella gospel music that sprang up around Birmingham, especially in the western suburbs, beginning in the 1940s. It continues, somewhat diminished, today.The early supergroup of the genre was the Fairfield Four (although there were usually five of them, just as many other "quartets" contained additional members). Some of the surviving members of the group, living in Nashville, continue to sing today, even though they are mostly in their 80s.Their distinctive music, born out of the coal mines and steel mills where African-Americans could actually earn a decent, if hard-earned living when Birmingham flourished as the "Pittsburgh of the South," has had something of a renaissance in recent years.

Tommy Stevenson

If you, like me, are a fan of "roots" music, especially from Alabama and elsewhere in the South, you should not miss documentary film director Robert Clem's "The Jefferson County Sound," which will air Monday at 8 p.m. on Alabama Public Television.The labor of love by my old college classmate and fellow preacher's kid takes its name from a distinctive form of black a cappella gospel music that sprang up around Birmingham, especially in the western suburbs, beginning in the 1940s. It continues, somewhat diminished, today.The early supergroup of the genre was the Fairfield Four (although there were usually five of them, just as many other "quartets" contained additional members). Some of the surviving members of the group, living in Nashville, continue to sing today, even though they are mostly in their 80s.Their distinctive music, born out of the coal mines and steel mills where African-Americans could actually earn a decent, if hard-earned living when Birmingham flourished as the "Pittsburgh of the South," has had something of a renaissance in recent years.That is due in large part to James Taylor, the founder of The Birmingham Sunlights, an a cappella group which has kept the music alive by performing the old standards.The Sunlights, who used to put on riveting performances at Birmingham's City Stages music festival, received initial training from another senior local quartet, the Sterling Jubilees, from whom group members learned the songs traditional to the area.The Sunlights, who are mentoring several younger groups, have appeared at numerous other festivals across the nation, such as the National Folk Festival in Lowell, Mass.The group has toured five countries in Africa and performed extensively in the Caribbean and Australia under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Information. The Sunlights recently performed in France as ambassadors of Alabama traditional culture. The group's dynamic performances on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" have increased its fan base in the United States.But Clem, who has been a fellow at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, and received an MFA from New York University graduate film school, says his hourlong documentary did not begin as a film strictly about the black a cappella musical form."I originally wanted to do a film exclusively on the Blind Boys of Alabama," he said of the 60-year-old gospel group that has also seen its career recently resurrected.Clem said, however, he became aware there was already another project under way on the Blind Boys, "so I decided to broaden the story to black gospel quartets." Although the Blind Boys are not strictly of the Birmingham sound genre, the group is included in Clem's film, as are the Mighty Clouds of Joy, whose James Brown-like performances, complete with full band, are anything but of the Jefferson County tradition.Clem said he also plans to expand the version that will run tomorrow night to include more groups and plans to call it "How They Got Over," which had tremendous religious resonance in the southern black church. Clem said he was originally inspired to document the Birmingham Sound by a similar documentary he saw more than a quarter of a century ago."I was blown away by the film ‘Say Amen Somebody' from 1984," he said. "I guess it all appeals to the preacher's kid in me, but I also love the music and the spirit these guys have."The preview DVD Clem sent me contains snippets of numerous performances and interviews of the older practitioners of the form, members of the Blind Boys of Alabama, and the articulate Taylor of the Sunlights, who sort of puts the whole scene in perspective.Clem's earlier film work has primarily been about his native South and particularly Alabama.He calls 1997's "Big Jim Folsom" a "meditation on populism and the racial moderation that might have been," while "In the Wake of the Assassins" from 2007, Clem documented the 1954 organized crime violence in Phenix City.That led to the election of former Gov. John Patterson, who was swept into office after his attorney general father was assassinated in the Georgia border town of Phenix City, Ala., as he conducted his investigation into the vice that ran rampant there.Clem, who says he is busy expanding the work you can see Monday night, has settled in upstate New York after graduating from Birmingham-Southern College and his film studies at NYU.

Reach Tommy Stevenson at beebranch123456@yahoo.com or 205-292-2236.

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